[Music] Local FLAC Playback

[Deeb]

A member of spotify team said to separate the FLAC idea post, into FLAC local playback and FLAC streaming. Someone else can create a FLAC streaming post, as I'm only after local playback. The original post with the 2 ideas in one post is here.

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Flac-on-Spotify-at-least-playback-of-your-own-flac/idi...

 
Vote for this post if you want LOCAL PLAYBACK OF FLAC FILES ONLY.

WHY WE NEED SPOTIFY TO PLAY OUR FLAC COLLECTION
Spotify already plays ALAC, all be it with stability problems, but what we really need is local FLAC playback because FLAC is the defacto standard for lossless audio encoding. 7digital has recently started selling FLAC yet spotify can't play them. Why not???

http://www.7digital.com/find-music/7digital-recommends/flac

The most commercially successful band on the planet (The Beatles), have released official remastered versions of all albums in 24bitFLAC format on a usb device.

http://www.everythingusb.com/the-beatles-stereo-usb-limited-edition-17961.html

Numerous bands have sold albums in FLAC format through their websites. FLAC is the defacto standard for lossless encoding, so please start supporting local playback of FLAC.

Another idea that is important to me is fixing the appalling "set the same volume level for all tracks", which doesn't take into account the subtle volume transients of an album that audio engineers spend hours working on. The following volume normalization method retains the intended volume differences as part of the album.

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/VOLUME-NORMALIZATION-IN-SPOTIFY-DAMAGES-INTEGRITY-OF-T...

[user-removed]

It has been 5 years! Almost every other media player can play FLAC. How does Spotify still not have this implemented? I start to feel like they have one person work 8 hours a week on the desktop client. We can have ideas get a lot of votes and they're simply ignored. Google Play Music doesn't have their own client but at least there's the great GPM-DP on github, and they at least listen to your bug reports and suggestions.

[Waldo_gg]

This is something that should have been implemented long ago. Skipping between players because you want to listen to your collection that is in very common format, is something needs to be dealth with. I would understand this situation if it were some properietary format that required licensing. 

[mondlandschaft]

I think it is BECAUSE flac does not require licensing - Spotify plays generate revenue for artists because they could claim the lincense for local mp3 playbacks. For flacs it's different, why should spotify pay playback revenue to an artist who's flacs have been purchased somewhere else?

But I'm not sure. What I'm sure of, is that I want local flac playback on Spotify. Gee, make it Premium only whatsoever, but please implement it. thx.

[Smitelol]

It would be nice to have Spotify as a central hub for all my music listening. However, as long as I have to constantly switch between music players for flac playback, this can never be the case. Once I've opened another music player for my flacs I usually stick to that player for a while, resulting in Spotify losing out on a lot of listen time.

I'd be fine with flac being a Premium only feature!

[Eville_Malice]

 I have spent soooo many hours coverting everything into FLAC.  You need to support this standard.

[kazamatzuri]

Any updates on this? 

[mondlandschaft]

Microsoft's Groove Music is discontinuing their service to make way for Spotify:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4046109/groove-music-and-spotify-faq

If any of you know MusicBee, it is a great stand-alone player for many file types that is also able to stream music directly through Groove's database. That would be a great alternative, to be able to stream Spotify's library through MusicBee (only with a premium subscription of course).

[TobiTaisToi]

It's still a shame!

[aduckonatree]

Just wanna state I would really love this feature. I like to buy music on physical media, and I make flac rips as opposed to mp3 simply because I can. Therefore most of my local files are flacs and I need to use some other player to open them. That's not exactly convenient, and I would rather prefer to use Spotify for everything.

[meahtenoha]

Updated on 2017-10-31

Thanks to everyone for their contribution to this thread. We really appreciate it. In the interest of full disclosure, we’d like to share with you the status of this request.

This was a popular request, so we thought long and hard about it. However, we’ve taken the decision not to pursue FLAC playback as we believe the time and effort it would take to implement such a fundamental change would be better spent developing other areas of the service. As a result, we’ve marked this idea as “Case Closed”.

We appreciate your understanding and hope you’ll agree that some of the cool features we’re currently working on will vindicate our decision. Please keep those ideas and requests coming! Together we can make Spotify the best it can be.